CWE-673: External Influence of Sphere Definition | Glexia
CWE-673 (External Influence of Sphere Definition) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-673: External Influence of Sphere Definition
External Influence of Sphere Definition represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other: Other
Developer Pattern
CWE-673 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-673, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-673: External Influence of Sphere Definition
The product does not prevent the definition of control spheres from external actors.
Typically, a product defines its control sphere within the code itself, or through configuration by the product's administrator. In some cases, an external party can change the definition of the control sphere. This is typically a resultant weakness.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Consider a blog publishing tool, which might have three explicit control spheres: the creation of articles, only accessible to a "publisher;" commenting on articles, only accessible to a "commenter" who is a registered user; and reading articles, only accessible to an anonymous reader. Suppose that the application is deployed on a web server that is shared with untrusted parties. If a local user can modify the data files that define who a publisher is, then this user has modified the control sphere. In this case, the issue would be resultant from another weakness such as insufficient permissions.
- In Untrusted Search Path (CWE-426), a user might be able to define the PATH environment variable to cause the product to search in the wrong directory for a library to load. The product's intended sphere of control would include "resources that are only modifiable by the person who installed the product." The PATH effectively changes the definition of this sphere so that it overlaps the attacker's sphere of control.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.